President Daniel Moi of Kenya should make the tour. His
cabinet ministers should make the tour. The Pope and all the bishops should make
the tour of the sick at LungaLunga village in the Nairobi slums, especially when
it rains. Then they would know what life is like for nearly half of the people
of Nairobi.

    I made the tour last Saturday. My health workers wanted to
spare me because it was raining, but I insisted because you can so easily forget
the plight of the poor and end up philosophizing. It was the usual tour of
visiting one sick person who was more desperate than the last one. Our long
timer, 30 year old Jacinta Wanjiku, who has completed her 60 injections for TB
and had looked better and more beautiful than the last visit, had taken a turn
for the worse. Her heart was palpitating. It appears that her nine month
struggle has been too much for her heart. I wonder what her four children will
do. Catherine Muthoni looked better. She had a bad hole of puss in her back
because of an injection to remove water from her lungs. I had given the health
workers some antibiotic salve and some of our old altar cloths to use as
bandages. I think she’ll make it and her children will be happy.

    But it was MUD, MUD, MUD everywhere. I had
rubber-knee-boots so I didn’t have to be too careful about leapfrogging from
rock to rock. But at one point my health workers told me to leapfrog lest I sink
below the knees in greenish-gray muck, mixed with excrement. And the inside of
many homes were mud, mud, mud too.

    But there are always bright spots. On the tour we ran into
seven-year-old Kalimi. Kalimi is dumb (can’t talk), but she hears normally. She
flashed a smile of white teeth from ten yards away. I gave her a cheek to cheek
hug and she danced away fluttering like a butterfly. I didn’t dance away, but I
was just as thrilled as she was. On Sunday after mass, I met Rose Kavindo and
her two year-old boy, David Njonya. Even though David was wary of me, he looked
great with his sewn lip and palate. And Rose look radiant and beautiful. I had
never seen her beauty as she sat for days and days in ragged clothes in a
borrowed shack waiting for some kind of help for David. I can remember how she
sat with her breast in his mouth, but he couldn’t suck because of the cleft
palate and lip. It was a long, long struggle to finally get David the operation
at Gertrude’s Hospital.

    But now we rejoiced in the Resurrection.